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Is your Data Protected? Really?
By Dale Walls
A few weeks ago while in attendance at a conference I heard a speaker say something rather peculiar. His statement was that even in server environments, most business computer users have more than 80% of their data stored on their local system hard drives. This is a funny situation considering the dramatic rise in the requirement of servers in even the smallest of business networks.
Now I know you’ve read article after article about how beneficial a server is to your environment. All of this remains true and for that I won’t bother beating that dead horse. But since you’ve invested a lot of money to have the best server backup drive available for your budget and maybe even opted to have your server data shipped across the Internet to some vendor’s server at night; have you been troubled to think about what happens say when your desktop hard drive crashes? A lot more is lost than you’d think.
Additionally the reality is that not every business has a need for a server. Within those offices, users operate solely in a workgroup environment using individual PCs and laptops as the critical tools in their daily operations sharing files between the systems or maybe even designating one of them as a makeshift server that is home to most of the data. In these workgroups, 100% of the data is stored on local hard drives. What is protecting those systems from failure?
With all this in mind I’d like to instill with you a new mentality: Your hard drives are going to crash! Maybe not today or tomorrow. Maybe not next week or month. But someday. As you push the envelope on that work-horse computer that you bought in 2000 and have every file created since then stored on it; know that the hard drive inside will crash someday and you need to be ready.
So what do you do? First you have to make the common critical failures at the desktop less likely to occur. For example everyone has surge protectors on their computers (or so we hope), but what about when the power flickers? That quick blink of power could potentially cause a drive to fail or data to corrupt. Additionally, remember that it’s not just the power that needs to be surge protected but also network, phone, and cable connections to your computers and equipment as well.
To prevent the failures of desktop systems due to power issues to include surge, black outs, and/or brown outs, look to equip each desktop with a surge protector that includes a battery backup and network cable surge protection. There are various products that provide power conditioning, battery-protected and surge-only outlets, and many more features. One of the key features to note is the necessity to connect the battery data port to the desktop computer to allow local software to monitor the status of the battery operation. For example when using the software and computer’s USB connection to the device, in the event of a power outage the software will monitor the battery power of the unit and gracefully shut down the computer system if normal power is not returned within a certain threshold such as minutes or percentage of battery power remaining.
Now with the power and surge protection measures in place, you’ve implemented a means to prevent likely causes of hard drive crashes. This does not however guarantee the life of the drive itself. There will be the day when it will go belly up. You should also know that here have been numerous cases of random hard drive failures occurring in new systems that are just a few weeks or months out of the box. This has been an infamous trend in low budget/short warranty systems specifically but could very well happen with any computer system.
To further guarantee that you’re protected from loss of data, another consideration would be to install external hard drives on all of your client systems. This holds true especially in work group environments where there are no other backup means on the network. These USB plug and play drives couple easily with systems and generally come with backup software to use. You could also take advantage of some built in tools of the operating system to schedule regular backup jobs.
So remember your data is important and needs to be protected. Keep in mind that your systems are not invulnerable to failure and some day a disaster will strike. Save yourself the time and money with these two simple solutions to invest in your success when that day comes. If you have any questions or would like vendor recommendations, please contact me at your convenience.Dale Walls is President of Corsica Technologies, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner & Small Business providing complete IT Solutions for businesses, government, and home computing in Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Feel free to contact Dale at 443.262.9290, or by email at dale@corsicatech.com.
